Friday, September 16, 2016

The Storyteller's Art

If you think of an Irish
storyteller, a seanchi, the first
image that might come to mind is that of a grizzled man wearing a cloth cap
sitting in a pub, a pipe in one hand and a pint in the other, regaling the lads
with stories of banshees. What you probably wouldn’t imagine is a lithe and
lovely, raven-haired lass with a pixie haircut and a twinkle in her blue eyes,
but that is Helena Byrne and she is, indeed, a seanchi.

Helena Byrne

Byrne recently arrived in the
States for a brief tour that brought her to QuinnipiacUniversity at the behest of the
university’s Ireland’s GreatHungerMuseum, which is
currently closed for renovations. Thus, Byrne found herself facing an eager
audience, many of them with Irish heritage, at the RockyTopStudentCenter
on the York Hill Campus.

Before her performance, Byrne sat
down to talk about the road that has brought her to Quinnipiac as a seanchi and her love of Irish mythology
and folktales. It seems Byrne was bitten early by the “performing bug,” for as
she notes on her web site, she has been performing since she was “knee high to
a guitar.” She laughed and explained: “As a child I used to put little shows
together and force my parents and my brother and sisters to sit down and watch
a whole rigmarole, an hour of ‘entertainment.’ I’ve just been performing for as
long as I can remember, always singing.”

However, it would take a while for
Byrne to become a professional performer. Although she was always active in
community events and sang in church, she went off to university to study
philosophy and theology, “finding herself,” as it were, while performing “on
the side,” but when she graduated she realized where her true love and passion
rested and she began to pursue it but, as is the case for most young artists,
success was not instantaneous.

“As you know,” she said, “Ireland
has plenty of castles, many of them on the West Coast, where I played the ‘Lady
of the Castle’ dressed in full gear – dress and head piece and everything – and
I and other girls there would serve food to the guests and sing songs and do
little dances.”

She continued to develop as a
singer and an actor, but she became a storyteller by accident. As she
explained, “I got a job working for the NationalLeprechaunMuseum
in Dublin,
which is not one of my proudest moments. My position was storyteller/tour guide
– a little bit of everything, basically just a tour guide who would tell a few
stories about leprechauns. I realized that I loved the storytelling element, I
loved that I could perform but it wasn’t so much acting because you could look
into people’s eyes and actually see their reactions.”

The realization that she loved
storytelling motivated her to learn more stories and research Irish folklore,
and then she landed a job as a resident storyteller at The Brazen Head, a Dublin pub. “That’s
essentially where I’ve honed my practice as a storyteller,” she said.

Though she had found one of her
true loves, that didn’t mean she had narrowed her horizons. She founded the
Break-Away Performance Company, “a production and theater company” that
organizes concerts and staged readings with Irish actors of new plays by
American and Irish writers as well as “innovative projects that involve using
Skype for people to collaborate,” helping to develop an artistic connection
between people in Ireland
and America.

She also uses Skype for her on-line
“story-telling lessons.” This came about after people came up to her and told
her that they would love to do what she was doing but they either didn’t know
how to develop a story or they would never have the courage to perform. Thus,
she created an on-line program that allows her to work individually with
students, mostly Americans, forming the “curriculum” based on what the students
wants to achieve, be it forming a story or developing a style of storytelling.

When asked what “makes” a good
storyteller, Byrne eagerly responded: “First of all, finding a story that suits
you, that suits your character and that you feel engaged in yourself. It’s very
difficult to tell a story with any great passion if you’re really not connected
to the story yourself. Find something that you really enjoy telling and that
will come out in your eyes and your physicality. Just being able to create a
picture in people’s imaginations, that’s what you’re really doing. You’re not
re-enacting a story, you’re not acting out something, you’re the medium between
the story and the audience’s imagination.”

Much to Byrne’s surprise, when she
posted on Face Book that she was searching for stories, her cousin contacted
her and suggested that she speak with her uncle, for it turns out that Byrne’s
grandfather had been a storyteller, something she was unaware of. She met with
her uncle and, over tea, heard many of the stories her grandfather had told,
including one she would share with her audience at Quinnipiac about her
grandfather experiencing the passing of a fairy death coach.

As Byrne explained, in Irish
society in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the seanchi was more than just a storyteller. These people would travel
from village to village and not only relate stories but also bring news of what
was happening in other parts of the country – births and deaths, politics and
perhaps a bit of gossip. They were as much oral journalists as storytellers, and
the stories they told performed many functions, for the fairies they spoke about
were not Disney-fied, fluttering creatures with magic wands in their hands but a
race that was integral to life in Ireland, a real presence that was
to be both feared and respected. One simply did not want to upset or insult the
fairies, for if one did dire consequences would follow.

This would be one of the main
points she would make to those at Quinnipiac who had come to hear her. After a
brief overview of the Great Famine and the central position of the lowly potato
in the diet of the common folk of Ireland,
she segued into a discussion of the fairies and belief in the “Other World”
that was common in Ireland
(when the sun set in this world it would rise in the “other world”). She
explained that there were (or perhaps still are) two types of fairies – the
“trooping fairies” – those who looked essentially human and would, on Samhain (Halloween) move en masse from
summer to winter quarters-- and the solitary fairies, including the leprechaun,
the banshee and the pooka.

The banshee

Emphasizing that belief in these
fairies was real, and that such belief gave a somewhat skewed yet
psychologically comforting aspect to the life of those who did not feel they
were in control of their lives, Byrne told several stories that dealt with one
or another aspect of fairy-dom, but, as she had explained earlier in the
interview, the true storyteller must find a story that resonates, and although
her initial stories were engaging and her background information informative,
it wasn’t until, near the end of her performance, that the audience became
totally mesmerized, for the last, long story Byrne told was about two
hunchbacks, Brian and Art, the former a good-hearted soul and the latter a mean
and greedy man -- both would have an encounter with the trooping fairies on Samhain.

In the telling of this story, Byrne
shifted into true storytelling mode, and the effect was impressive – it was as
if she had become possessed by the story or, as she had explained earlier in
the interview, become the medium between the story and the audience. As she
wove her tale, you could sense many people of advanced years shedding their age
and again becoming wide-eyed children as they listened to what happened to
Brian and Art -- they were all there with these two hunchbacks, watching the
fairies dance around the fairy tree or standing before the Fairy King as he
rendered his judgment on Brian’s and Art’s actions, and issuing a collective
sigh of relief and satisfaction as Byrne ended her story and they returned from
that dark, fairy-filled night in Ireland to a meeting room in Quinnipiac.

Artistic imagining of the fairy tree

At the end of the evening, Byrne
told a brief story about a modern female seanchi
who was being interviewed for an article. The interviewer finally asked her if
she truly believed in the tales she told, if she believed in the fairies. After
considering her answer, the woman said: “I don’t – but they’re there anyway.”
Byrne had been asked essentially the same question during the interview and she,
too, had paused to consider her answer. Her response was to tell a story:
“Irish people have a very funny relation with the fairies because today’s
generation will start off being quite dismissive and say, ‘Ah, that’s in the
past,’ but you start telling these stories and it reawakens their childhood,
because they remember hearing these stories as children. A man in his 30s came
up to me at the end of a show and said, ‘I know it’s all kind of rubbish but…my
brother has heard the banshee three times.’ So, it’s a very peculiar
relationship the Irish have with the fairies these days.”